I met with their founder about a year ago and he was super-enthusiastic about this service. Really glad they made it to the beta stage – and really hope they’ll keep going with it.

http://beta.mflow.com/signup?invitecode=05N624 – if you sign up using this link, I get 1 pound and can play with paid features of the service :)

An engineer thinks that his equations are an approximation to reality. A physicist thinks reality is an approximation to his equations. A mathematician doesn’t care.

Honestly, this could easily be the best and most apt phrase I ever heard. Does anyone know who should I attribute this quote to?

Well, maybe it’s all for the good, as I’m not sure that I was really able to understand and appreciate this book back then, when I was 15 and everything was black and white. Of all things Clarke predicted, one I value the most – in the midst of the Cold War he predicted that future of humanity and space explorations would be virtually impossible without cooperation between countries, nations and people of these nations. Including – not just including, but thinking mainly of the U.S. and Russia. Don’t know why but this feels so right somehow.

1. To start with you will need to switch your Cr-48 to dev mode – which is easy if you follow this manual.
2. While you’re here, with your battery out, you can also plug in your SIM card into the laptop. Here’s an information I figured by trial-and-error method: on current build, which is 0.10.156.46, Vodafone and O2 do not work. Of all SIM cards I had available, T-Mobile works with no problems whatsoever.
3. Plug your battery back in, turn laptop on, wait a couple of seconds, login…
4. Now press Ctrl-Alt-T. It will bring you to shell window. Since you’re now in dev mode, you can type “shell” and get a real Linux console.
5. Type “modem_set_carrier Generic UMTS” – no quotes, register matters. Press Enter. Wait to see command produce some output, which could make sense to some of us after all.

That’s it. Now wait couple of minutes, and your laptop should see network called “Generic UMTS” when you click wireless connectivity sign. Do not do activation as it won’t work anyway – just choose “Generic UMTS” in network list after clicking wireless icon, and with some luck soon it should connect. You can verify results by going into Network Settings, finding “Generic UMTS” connection and clicking Options button.

That’s it boys and girls. Tell me if something doesn’t work out, but don’t hold your breath – I’m only wandering around, and sometimes discover something by accident :-)

1. Unless these guys has landed in a military airport (and I highly doubt that), they wouldn’t be warmly meet by soldiers with AK-47s (which are not in use anymore, well, except maybe in Moldova)
2. Airport security guards tend not to wear a full set of “Red Banner” orders (which were mostly given during Second World War, and usually for something truly exceptional; and yes, it’s exclusively military).
3. A “Motherland calls” banner which was hugely popular, right, in 1941-1945, is … let’s say – not that much in use anymore. For the last 50 years, that is.
4. Soldiers are wearing a mixture of 40s and 00s uniform.
5. The old GAZ truck they’ve been driven in, hasn’t been in use for at least 30 years. I’m actually quite surprised they found a working one, that alone is an achievement!
6. … the list can go on and on and on and on without even touching our favorite stereotypes (ushankas-vodka-pretty girls with long hair … wait, leave the last one, right. For a change, that’s mostly true).
7. And for fucks sake, it’s fucking Moldova, not Russia! (that may actually explain quite a few things – there’s a war there, you know…)

So did we finish with Skins? Can go on with my rant? No, not really.

One thing I started realizing mostly recently is that any people tend to be ignorant about any foreign culture. As I live in London, people often ask me questions about Britain. Now forgive me if I won’t list them here — being not natively British, I don’t feel like I have a right to exercise my wit and pretend to be humorous about it. No, it’s funny, really, just not in that way (and even less will I pin-point where were most of these people who did ask me these questions, however mostly they had very funny accent).

Is it good? Is it bad? Well, that’s the way it is. No morals here, make your own conclusions and I’ll go back to my Skins (stop laughing I told you!!) and to my Zürich-London flight, which due in … oh my, less than an hour! I think I should be moving now!

Early in the development cycle, it’s perfectly acceptable to go for a policy of “zero bugs” and “100% tests”. But as the deadline looms, these choices need to be reconsidered all the time and evaluated while keeping a close eye of the final goal. Very often, Agilists simply forget that their job is to produce software that satisfies customers, not software that meets some golden software engineering scale.

Worthy article written by someone who understands stuff. Read it.